There are a large number of organizations that presently have substantial amounts of audio, video, and image content in analog form. Many of these organizations are currently moving toward putting such multimedia content into digital form in order to save costs in the areas of data storage and retrieval. That is, similar to other types of data, multimedia content can be easily stored on and retrieved from relatively inexpensive digital storage devices.
The migration of multimedia content from analog form to digital form also provides an organization with the ability to store, search, browse, and retrieve digitized multimedia content from distributed sites. That is, an organization having a number of distributed offices can store, search, browse, and retrieve digitized multimedia content from a centralized storage facility over a proprietary intranet computer network such as, for example, a local area network (LAN), or a public internet computer network such as, for example, the world wide web.
Furthermore, the multimedia content itself may be distributed. That is, an organization that is global in nature may have a number of distributed permanent archival storage locations where digitized multimedia content is permanently stored, or a number of distributed temporary storage locations where digitized multimedia content that is associated with work in progress is temporarily stored. Similar to above, such an organization could also store, search, browse, and retrieve digitized multimedia content from the distributed storage locations over a proprietary intranet computer network or a public internet computer network.
Additionally, an organization may want other entities located outside of the organization to be able to search, browse, and retrieve digitized multimedia content stored and maintained within the organization. For example, an organization may want to sell multimedia content to an outside entity, which may then use the purchased multimedia content for some purpose such as, for example, a news broadcast. Similar to above, the outside entity could search, browse, and retrieve digitized multimedia content from a storage facility within the organization over a proprietary intranet computer network or a public internet computer network.
However, despite the above-described benefits associated with digitized multimedia content, organizations presently have little or no means of searching within multimedia content, organizing information about multimedia content, and delivering multimedia content in a ubiquitous manner. That is, there arc presently little or no means for is searching inside streams of multimedia content (e.g., audio/video streams), adding meta-information to multimedia content (i.e., annotating multimedia content) for purposes of indexing within multimedia content, and providing universal access to indexed multimedia content over a variety of connection speeds and on a variety of client platforms. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a technique for organizing distributed multimedia content and for searching, browsing, and retrieving such organized distributed multimedia content in an efficient and cost-effective manner so as to overcome the above-described shortcomings of the prior art.